The Contradictions in Hitler’s Ideology

Sebastian Hafner emigrated from Germany before World War II, and later wrote a book titled “The Meaning of Hitler”. It might seem that there are so many books on Hitler that a “neglected” history blog is the wrong place for another, but Hitler’s ideology is not examined often. In a chapter titled “Misconceptions”, Hafner explains Hitler’s ideology, along with the ironies in it. I will excerpt a bit here:

According to Hitler, the only actors in all historical processes are nations or races, not classes or religions, and strictly speaking not even states. History ‘is the description of the course of a nation’s struggle for its life’. Foreign policy is the art of ensuring for a nation the amount and quality of living space it needs. Domestic policy is the art of procuring for a nation the power necessary for this, in the form of its racial quality and its numbers.

In short, politics is war, and the preparation for war, and war is mainly about living space.
Wars are also about domination and subjection. What the ‘aristocratic basic idea of Nature desires is the victory of the strong and the annihilation of the weak or his unconditional subjection’.

Two concepts jump out – the need for a war of all against all, and the need for a war between all and the Jews!

The perpetual warlike struggle between nations is about world domination. Hitler said this in 1930: ‘Every being strives for expansion and every nation strives for world domination.’ And that is a good thing because ‘we all feel that in the distant future man will find himself confronted by problems which only a supreme race, as a master nation based on the resources and facilities of the entire globe, can be called up to solve.”

The concept of race can be looked at the way a stockbreeder excludes inferior examples and uses selective breeding. It also can be used to differentiate groups such as the “Nordic” race from the “Slavic” race.

So the actors in history are rivals for living space and world domination, and for that struggle they must be armed, not just ideologically and militarily, but also biologically, by raising their racial quality.

But alongside this struggle is the struggle between the Aryans and the Jews. In other words, between the Jews and all the rest, who might otherwise be in continous struggle against each other, but who, against the Jews, all belong to the same side. The struggle is not about living space, but literally about life; it is a struggle of extermination.

‘The Jew’ is everybody’s enemy: “His ultimate aim is the de-nationalization, the inter-bastardization of the other nations, the lowering of the racial level of the noblest, as well as domination over that racial jumble…” And more than that: “If the Jew with the aid of his Marxist creed remains victorious over the nations of this world, then his crown will be the wreath on the grave of mankind…”. So obviously mankind must unite to exterminate the Jews to avoid itself being exterminated.

The Jews, thought Hitler, were by their very nature international and anything that was international was Jewish. The Jews fought nation states mercilessly using pacifism and internationalism, capitalism and communism, and in domestic politics the Jews used the weapon of democracy. All these tools to weaken the state were inventions of the Jews to disrupt the ‘Aryan’ nations in their magnificent struggle for living space (a struggle in which the Jews, cunningly, did not participate) and thus to ensure their own world domination.

So, asks Hafner: “Why did all nations have to unite against the Jews when surely they had their hands full fighting against each other for living space? Answer: they had to unite just because they had to fight for their living space, and in order that they might devote themselved undisturbed to this struggle. The Jews were the spoilsports in this pleasant game.

If the Jews tried to integrate and become German, French, English or other patriots, then that was the worst thing of all, for their aim would then be “to push the nations into wars against each other [but surely this was just what, according to Hitler, the nations were for?] and in that way gradually raise themselves to being masters.

Hafner concludes with this observation: Hitlerism has at least one thing in common with Marxism – the claim to be able to explain the whole of world history from one single point of view. “The history of all society so far is a history of class struggles,” we read in the Communist Manifesto, and analogously in Hitler “All events in world history are merely the manifestation of the self-preservation drive of the races”. Such sentences, writes Hafner, have considerable emotive power. Anyone reading them has the feeling of suddenly seeing the light; what had been confused becomes simple, what had been difficult becomes easy….

In the year 2019, Hitler is still a hero to some; I just saw yesterday a video of a young Australian man telling a Rabbi he should have been killed in Auschwitz, and there have been Muslim marches in Europe with cries of “Hitler was right”, and Mein Kampf was once a best-seller in the Muslim nation of Turkey. A Jewish professor who tauught in Germany told an acquaintance of my parents that the German city of Leipzig is crawling with Nazis. I think it was the anti-semitism that has made Hitler an eternal hero to some, not his wars, or his killing of so many Russian POWs, or his euthanasia of the retarded. My guess is also that his new devotees do not know all that much of the philosophy Hafner explains above.